Prussia Concordat
The Prussian Concordat of June 14, 1929 is a state church treaty concluded between the Free State of Prussia and the Holy See . As a concordat , the treaty is also part of the subject matter of international law . In the German states , the provisions of the Prussian Concordat largely continue to apply today, insofar as they are successor states to Prussia. With the Papal Bull Pastoralis officii nostri of August 13, 1930, the Prussian Concordat was implemented.
history
After the overthrow of the monarchy in 1918, it became evident in Prussia that the relationship to the Catholic Church had last been regulated in the outdated, essential provisions no longer applicable circumscription bull De salute animarum of June 16, 1821. Since then, however, the relations between the Catholic Church and the state in Prussia have been strained again and again, for example by the state turmoil in Cologne (1837) or by anti-church legislation during the Kulturkampf . When the Cologne Archbishop Felix von Hartmann died on November 11, 1919, bilateral negotiations were necessary because the previous provisions for the appointment of a new archbishop no longer apply.
On the initiative of the Prussian Ministry of Culture, the Fulda Bishops 'Conference dealt with concordat issues for the first time at its extraordinary meeting in January 1920 and appointed the priest, Trier canon lawyer and central politician Ludwig Kaas to be the liaison between the Bishops' Conference and Nuncio Eugenio Pacelli .
In May 1920, the first negotiations on a future Concordat took place at the speaker level . However, only in the run-up to his move from Munich to Berlin did Pacelli himself enter into concordat negotiations with Prussia. In the foreground were the issues that the Holy See had not yet dealt with with regard to German interests, such as the adjustment of church borders to the political realities changed by the Versailles Peace Treaty (parts of Posen and West Prussia were ceded to Poland ; only von Gnesen-Posen and Kulm were Remains in Prussia). That is why the Holy See entered concordat negotiations with Poland, which, contrary to expectations, were quickly concluded on February 10, 1925 because of the Pope's friendliness to Poland.
With the Prussian Concordat, Paderborn and Breslau were to be elevated to archbishopric and Berlin , previously part of the diocese of Breslau , to the diocese. In response to Protestant pressure, initially only the establishment of a prelature was envisaged for Berlin , but the Holy See made the establishment of the diocese in May 1928 - against the resistance of Protestant circles in Germany - a conditio sine qua non . In the Prussian Concordat, the previous Nordic mission areas were finally added to the existing northern German dioceses of Osnabrück , Paderborn and Hildesheim . From the territory of the great Archdiocese of Cologne which was Diocese of Aachen developed. In addition to the territorial changes, there were also the reorganization of the endowments, the episcopal right of jurisdiction over the theological faculties, the election of bishops by the cathedral chapter , which elects the new bishop from a list of three of the Holy See, the state right of memory, political clause and the adjustment of the outdated patronage law.
Even if the Prussian Concordat provisions of June 14, 1929 lagged far behind those of the Bavarian Concordat from an ecclesiastical-Roman point of view , the Concordat created legal certainty in church matters.
During the negotiations on the Prussian Concordat Pacelli essentially dismantled the Prussian Kulturkampf regulations, but instead renounced the school regulations that were very important to him in favor of a conclusion of the Concordat. He could only do that because he himself and Pius XI. recognized the limits of the Concordats early on. With the Papal Bull Pastoralis officii nostri of August 13, 1930, the Prussian Concordat was implemented.
present
After 1945, the Prussian Concordat was recognized by the newly founded states of the Federal Republic of Germany on the former Prussian territory , but not by the GDR . In the contract between the State of North Rhine-Westphalia and the Holy See of March 26, 1984, the largest Prussian successor state and the Holy See linked the Prussian Concordat by expressly confirming the continued validity of the Prussian Concordat by adding and changing certain provisions. It was only after reunification that the provisions of the Concordat were revived in those new federal states that are successor states to Prussia.
The Concordat also applies to the non-Prussian parts of the Archdiocese of Hamburg , which was established in 1995. This was part of the founding negotiations for the Archdiocese, as Old Hamburg and Mecklenburg never belonged to Prussia.
literature
- Dieter Golombek: The political history of the Prussian Concordat (1929), Mainz 1970
- Joseph Listl (Ed.): The Concordats and Church Treaties in the Federal Republic of Germany Text edition for science and practice, 2 vols., Berlin 1987
- Joseph Listl: The concordative development from 1817 to 1988, in: Handbuch der Bayerischen Kirchengeschichte, ed. by Walter Brandmüller, Vol. 3, St. Ottilien 1991, pp. 427-463.
- Lothar Schöppe (Ed.): Concordates since 1800. Original text and German translation of the current Concordates, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin 1964
- Werner Weber (Ed.): The German Concordats and Church Treaties of the Present, 2 vols., Göttingen 1962 and 1971
